On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted for the American colonies to become independent from Great Britain. Two days later, delegates from the 13 colonies adopted Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence.” So on the Fourth of July, the colonists declared that America would be a free land and an amazing democratic experiment began.
One belief stood above the rest: that all people are created in the image of God and thus must be afforded dignities. And so Thomas Jefferson wrote, and a new nation claimed to believe…
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Right, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
We are now 244 years into our democratic experiment of building this land of the free. The question we should all ask is: “How are we doing?” Trying to find the true answer to that question will take the questioner well beyond the recent events surrounding George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Jacob Blake. This debate regarding the answer to this question began before our nation did.
In this series of articles, I will analyze three key junctures in our nation’s history in an attempt to biblically answer the question, “How successful have we been at creating a nation where all people are free and all people are treated with the dignity of being image-bearers of God?
The Revolutionary War
The colonists arrived on these shores in 1607, and they lived 169 years under British rule before they declared their independence. With deep conviction, they came to prefer the prospect of war over their acceptance of the growing burden of British taxation and increasing military presence. They wanted to be free.
Perhaps no one captured that sentiment better than Patrick Henry. In his most famous speech, he exclaimed no less than three times that he would rather die than to be what amounted in his mind a slave of Britain:
“For on my part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery.” … [I]t is now too late to retire from the contest… There is no retreat, but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! … Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Yet Patrick Henry, like so many of the founding fathers of America himself, owned slaves. When questioned about the moral contradiction of seeking to fight to the death for his own freedom while owning slaves, Patrick Henry confessed, “I am drawn along by ye general inconvenience of living without them; I will not, I cannot justify it.”
This is the sad tale of many of our American founders — hypocrisy. Standing against the evil of slavery, Thomas Jefferson wrote this in an original draft of the Declaration of Independence: “execrable commerce… this assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties.”
However, in time, Jefferson stopped speaking against slavery. Of the 600 slaves he came to own, he freed only two during his lifetime. Of this mockery of freedom, “The Virginia abolitionist Moncure Conway, noting Jefferson’s enduring reputation as a would-be emancipator, remarked scornfully, ‘Never did a man achieve more fame for what he did not do.’”
The pressing question during our nation’s formation and quest for liberty was: “Would a liberated America actually live up to its ideals and grant liberty to the slaves?” The answer was “No.” Despite debates from abolitionists and lofty founding documents, the decision regarding racial reconciliation from the new nation was a tragic one. America decided that it would not free its slaves.
So although the first slaves arrived on August 20, 1619, and groaned for their freedom for 157 years, the founders ruled that America — the supposed land of the free — would be a nation of freedom for Whites only and with Blacks remaining enslaved.
Slavery And The Bible
How does the Bible assess America’s decision to remain a nation deeply divided by race — one free and the other enslaved? Scripture answers with the resounding answer — God hated it! He condemns America’s race-based, human-trafficking, chattel, slavery in no uncertain terms. 1
1. American slavery is based on racialized kidnapping, which is forbidden by the Bible
To be clear, much of the kidnapping was done by Africans, who kidnapped other Africans and sold or traded them to Europeans. In the Old Testament, it was a capital crime to 1.) kidnap a person and sell him into slavery or 2.) to own a person who had been kidnapped for slavery.
“He who kidnaps a man, whether he sells him or he is found in his possession, shall surely be put to death,” Exodus 21:16.
The New Testament also explicitly condemns the entire enterprise as a means of acquiring labor.
“We know that the law is not meant for a righteous person, but for the lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinful, for the unholy and irreverent, for those who kill their fathers and mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral and males who have sex with males, for slave traders (man-stealers, which repeats Ex 21:16), liars, perjurers, and for whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching,” 1 Timothy 1:9-10.
Human trafficking was, is, and will always be a gross evil and a condemnable blight against whoever practices it.
2. The Bible calls for the protection of female slaves from abuse and sexual assault (Deut. 21:10-14)
However, America instituted laws to ensure that there would be zero accountability for raping Black women. The colonies established laws that prohibited slaves from testifying against white rapists. Slavemaster Thomas Thistlewood boasted in his records of having 3,852 sexual encounters with 138 slaves. To remedy the moral dilemma of masters having children with slaves. America abandoned its British father laws, which mandated that fathers acknowledge all their children and provide them with necessities, and adopted the Roman means of determining lineage. In other words, the colonists write into law that a child’s lineage would run through the mother rather than the father. So if the mother were a slave, even if the father were the master, the father could treat his own child as property rather than as a son or daughter. That’s evil!
3. An injured or abused slave was to be released, according to the Bible
“If a man strikes the eye of his male or female slave, and destroys it, he shall let him go free on account of his eye. And if he knocks out a tooth of his male or female slave, he shall let him go free on account of his tooth” Exodus 21:26-27.
Yet America legalized torture and even murder of slaves with no legal consequences. The Act of 1705 stated, “And if any resist his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such a correction, it shall not be accounted a felony. But the master, owner, and every such other person so giving correction, shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such incident had never happened,” In addition: “[I]t shall be lawful for any person or persons, whosoever, to kill and destroy such slaves by such ways and means as he, she, or they shall think fit, without accusation or impeachment of any crime for the same.”
4. In the Bible, slaves who escaped were to be protected and given freedom
“You shall not hand over to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you” (Deut. 23:15). But America added the statute: “Should a sheriff, or anyone else find it in their hearts to capture the slave alive and deliver him to his master, that the master could punish the slave by dismembering them to terrify others from the practice. So they would cut off their toes or half their foot.”
Slavery And Theologians
There is simply no honest reading of the Bible and recounting of our history that can conclude anything else than that American slavery is utterly rejected by the Bible as an evil institution. How then did our nation claiming to be founded on a Judeo-Christian worldview justify enslaving Black people? By following the lead of its leading theologians who twisted Scripture to justify the unjustifiable.
Often quoted and American beloved scholars like R.L. Dabney taught that God’s curse on Cain was black skin and that God’s curse on Canaan was his and the enslavement of Africans forever. However, these interpretations fail to withstand even the most superficial reading of Genesis 4:15 and 9:25. God’s curse upon Cain was his banishment (Gen 4:11-12). The sign that God placed on Him is clearly stated to be for His protection against future attackers and not enslavement (Gen 4:14-15).
Furthermore, the curse on Canaan could not possibly justify enslaving black people from Africa because Canaan’s descendants weren’t Africans! Canaanites lived in the land of Canaan — God’s Promised Land to Israel. God fulfilled this curse against the Canaanites over 3,000 years ago under Joshua and finally King David when they conquered the land of Canaan.
However, the truth of Scripture didn’t stop our Puritan theologians, whom we laud for grounding American culture in a Judeo-Christian ethic, from also grounding American culture in a theological framework that justified our racist form of slavery.
George Whitefield said, “Georgia can never be a flourishing province unless negroes are employed [as slaves].” Whitefield also believed that Africans were “human” yet “subordinate creatures.”
Charles Hodge wrote, “And where there is diversity there is sure to be superiority and inferiority… It would be folly to deny that the blacks are as a race inferior to the whites.
Slavery And Sin
At the end of the day what motivated America to enslave black people? No doubt several things, but one for sure was a love of money (1 Tim 6:10). It is at the root of all kinds of evils including human trafficking.
Historian David Brion Davis concludes: “In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide. The only asset more valuable than the black people was the land itself.”
The viewing of slaves as lucrative property and not as citizens of America for over 150 years is documented in the infamous Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in March 6, 1857, just four years before the Civil War.
In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that slaves who lived in a “free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to [their freedom]; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had declared free all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36°30′, was unconstitutional.
The Chief Justice Chief Justice Taney wrote in his decision:
“[Negroes] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.”
So began our nation, a nation divided by the false notion that God did not create all men to be equal, but God created a hierarchy of races with white people on the top and black people on the bottom. So in the land of the self-professing free for almost 250 years (from 1617 until 1865), White immigrants came to these shores with the freedom to pursue life liberty and happiness while Black people who came chained to ships as cargo could not.
Our journey towards a nation where all people are free and all people are treated with the dignity of being image-bearers of God started terribly. For my next essay, we’ll stop at another key juncture in our history and to consider how the Civil War impacted our national pursuit of becoming one indivisible nation under God.
Addendum
What was the word from the Bible-preaching churches at the time towards slavery and racial reconciliation? Some historians have stated that the church did more to support the cause of slavery than did the Confederate army.
“The Greatest Proslavery Army: The Conservative Clergy” by Joel McDurmon: For example, Confederate leaders in church and state recognized the importance of the clergy to the southern cause and the war effort. Memphis preacher R.C. Grundy stated on August 21, 1864, that “the southern rebel church … is worth more to Mr. Jeff Davis than an army of one hundred thousand drilled and equipped men.” Likewise, William Porcher Miles, chairman of the military committee in the Confederate House of Representatives, testified in February 1865, “The clergy have done more for the success of our cause, than any other class. They have kept up the spirits of our people, have led in every philanthropic movement… Not even the bayonets have done more.”
“The deeper problem was, however, that [Presbyterian minister Benjamin] Palmer and others like him throughout the South’s Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other churches had defended the necessity of preserving the slave system explicitly on racial grounds, appealing to the Bible, nature, reason, and a variety of anecdotes, historical and current. The War may have abolished the institution, but it did not abolish the racism at its root. The racism was left to manifest in other forms.”
For further reading:
- The Birth Of A “Free” Nation: America’s Long, Troubled Journey Towards Racial Reconciliation, Part 1
- A War For Freedom: America’s Long, Troubled Road Towards Racial Reconciliation, Part 2
- Legalized Racism And Civil Rights: America’s Long, Troubled Road Towards Racial Reconciliation, Part 3